CAFÉ ASSASSIN Read online

  We concocted a plan. Summers had some rope and Rogan knew how to tie a noose. He’d been in the scouts and collected a badge for knot work, at least that’s what he claimed. I always thought he could tie a noose because he had taught himself to tie a noose in the eventuality that he would want to hang himself or someone else. Rogan set about making the noose, while we dug a ditch under the branch of the hanging tree, a grave sized ditch only not as deep. If Madman Marz should creep up on us in the night, we would hang him from the gibbet of the branch and bury him under a thin layer of top soil, rubble and slag.

  We needed provisions for the evening: sleeping bags, knives, food, drink, warm clothes, torches, lighters or matches. We went back home and gathered the things we needed. Summers was sixteen and the oldest and could easily pass for eighteen. We collected all our money together and poured it into his cupped hands. He went to the off-licence to buy bottles of cider and tins of lager. You were always uneasy around any illicit activity but had the sense to keep quiet. I was the only one in the gang who sensed it but I never gave the game away. We were mates going back to the age of six. We were loyal.

  We gathered back at the site and organised all our goods. Summers had a net bag and he submerged the cider and the lager into the stream to keep them cool. We built up the fire supply. We had Bobs dad’s axe and we took it in turns to chop wood. We went on missions to find more dead branches. Before long we had a sizeable pile. When it was dark, we wandered around the streets. Bowie said he was going to steal a motorbike and we could take turns riding it on the slacks. Something Bowie frequently did and one of the reasons we liked having him around. Again, it was something you never took part in. No one said anything about you not joining in – probably just pleased that they could have more turns themselves.

  We went back to camp and lit the fire. The wood crackled and Summers went to get the bag of booze. We drank from the bottle, passing it around. Summers and Bob drank the lager, that little bit older, their taste buds that little bit more ‘sophisticated’. We drank and joked and laughed until the fire wood had gone and the booze had been drunk. It was late. Still no Bowie, but again this was not unusual. It would sometimes take him all night to get the right motorcycle and he would appear at dawn going full throttle over the slacks, waking us up.

  We were asleep. There was a noise and I woke up. I listened but I couldn’t hear anything. The fire was still burning, no flames just the wooden sticks glowing red in the distance. Then I heard something smash. A bottle of Woodpecker. I could make out the silhouette of the axe, positioned between our tent and the dying fire. I listened again but I heard nothing. I was going to go back to sleep when I heard it: ‘keek, brrrmf’. It was some way in the distance but it was the unmistakable noise of Madman Marz. I shook you awake.

  What is it? You wanted to know. I signalled to you to shush and we listened together. At first nothing, then the familiar ‘keek, brrrmf’. This time louder, closer. I could see the fear on your face. We shook Steps awake and whispered an explanation. We huddled together and listened. Nothing. Then we saw the silhouette of a man in a parka with the snorkel hood zipped up. He was in front of the fire and he was reaching for the axe.

  We didn’t say anything, we were too frightened, but we huddled even closer together in the middle of the small tent. We wanted to scream out to Summers and Rogan and Bob in the other tent but were too scared. We saw the silhouette approach. He began to circle the tent, making his repulsive noise. Then nothing. We heard nothing, we saw nothing. We were beginning to think he had gone away, when out of nowhere the axe came through the middle of the tent, ripping a hole in the thin canvas, just missing our heads. We screamed out. We huddled even closer. He had gone, but we didn’t dare move.

  We stayed like that for some time until Rogan shouted out asking us what was wrong. We shouted back. ‘Come in our tent’, he said, but we were too frightened to move. After some time, still afraid, we started to relax. Perhaps he had really gone, perhaps we were safe. But then we saw his silhouette at the entrance of the tent. He was unzipping the fly sheet. He was coming inside. We shuffled to the back. There he was, poking his hooded head through the gap in the sheets. ‘Keek, brrrmf’, ‘keek, brrrmf’, ‘keek brrrmf’. We wanted to laugh. It was funny. In one hand he held the axe. His free hand reached for your leg.

  You were shaking. We’re not bad, you said. As if this would dissuade him in some way. Again I had to fight the impulse not to burst out laughing. Then you did something that shocked me. You grabbed hold of Steps and you pushed him in front of you. Steps was the smallest, the youngest, the quietest in the gang, and you had decided to sacrifice him to save your own bacon, although after you would claim that you were saving both of us. Madman Marz was grabbing Steps’s leg and dragging him out of the tent towards the hangman’s noose. Summers and Rogan and Bob were screaming. Steps was kicking and kicking. He managed to boot Madman Marz in the face, or at least the hole where his face must have been. And now he was running away, we could see the red and white stripes of his socks flash as he disappeared and we were safe. We looked at each other. I stared into your eyes. You had chosen what side you were on. You looked back in shame. I didn’t need to say anything. I noticed a wet patch between your legs.

  In the morning we went on a breakfast recce, stealing milk, bread and eggs from the door steps of red brick terraced houses. This time you even joined in, finding a lesser sin to cover up your bigger one. Then Bowie turned up on a 250cc Yamaha, or a Kawasaki – or whatever it was – and you were the first one to jump on the back. No fear this time, no disapproval. You just wanted to fit in, cover up what you had done, and I stood there and said nothing.

  Steve had walked back to the suppliers. One of the frames was faulty. The job was nearly done. It was warm in the conservatory. I’d been given the mentally challenging job of cleaning the glass, filling the gaps with silicone and tidying up the site in general. There was about an hour’s work. Steve wouldn’t be back for some time so I lay down on a bench and closed my eyes.

  I was woken from my sleep by Steve shaking me and shouting in my ear, What the fuck are you doing?!

  It was not the first time I’d fallen asleep on the job and Steve, with more jobs lined up, was feeling the pressure. The job was a week overdue and Steve couldn’t stand to not deliver on time. Even a day over brought him out in a sweat and a fit of Tourettes. I jumped up, barely aware of where I was. All right, all right, ALL RIGHT! This was the closest I’d ever been to striking him. My fists were clenched and I was screaming in his face.

  I leave you for two hours to do a one hour job and you haven’t done a scrap of work, and I find you asleep on the client’s garden furniture. You’ve got a fucking cheek, you cunt!

  Listen, I’ve had enough of this, Steve. I’ve had enough of you and I’ve had enough of your job.

  I walked off.

  You’re fired! He shouted after me.

  I didn’t turn around.

  I get my licence back in a few weeks, so I don’t even need you. You hear me? You’re fired, yer cunt!

  It was only when I returned to Richard’s place and was making a cup of tea, that it occurred to me that I had acted in haste. I’d walked out of a job that I needed in order to pay my keep. The club was picking up but it was still a long way from generating sufficient income to keep me.

  I’m sure things will work out, said Richard, You’ll see.

  Richard was not someone I would immediately ask for financial advice, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I gave him a nod. You think so do you?

  Oh yes. Have faith, Nick.

  Have faith in what? The mystical forces of the cosmos, the spiritus mundi, black magic, God? Perhaps I could simply barter for everything I wanted from now on, as Richard had previously suggested.

  If it’s the rent you’re worried about paying, I don’t mind if you miss a week, he said.

  An act of ki
ndness. I had great trouble then, and I have great trouble now, dealing with acts of kindness. I took Ray out for a walk. Ray had made a full recovery, and I watched him as he ran after rabbits.

  Like Ray, I was almost there. I’d almost reached one object: that of financial independence. Another few months of the club building up and I would be there. But could I survive those few months? I was developing an amphetamine dependency. I was developing a dependency to alcohol and dope and Valium. Who was I kidding? I was a full on phet-head … I was taking phet now just to get going in the morning. I couldn’t even answer the telephone without drugs.

  Financial independence was comforting but not the be all and end all. I still had some way to go before I had the rabbit in my teeth. There had been some developments. I hadn’t managed to speak to Officer Leadbeater, but I had decided to go to his place of work. Perhaps if I met with him I could get closer to my goal.

  I walked down a disused railway track. Just like in Manchester, the track had been developed into a cycle path. I spotted a comma butterfly on a fence post. I was remembering a hot summer. Before the Madman Marz episode. We must have been ten or eleven. It was almost the end of the summer holidays. For six weeks the sun had baked the earth. The verges of gorse were turned into straw. It was you who had the box of matches, Andrew. A full box. We started with a little fire of twigs but it soon took. Then there was a gust of wind and whoosh! The whole thing was up in glorious flames. The grass crackled and whistled. We laughed out of shock. We had to run as fast as we could to beat the fire roaring towards us. We just made it to the road in time. We stood leaning on the fence, panting and laughing. All we could see beneath was the light and heat and dance of the flames.

  I was trying to pinpoint it in my mind: when you stopped being an ally. Internally you must have been changing long before there were any outward signs. Like the journey a comma butterfly takes, only in reverse. Instead of beginning life as one of the crawling things, hiding in a shell where the change was concealed, to begin again as a shimmering check of gold, you had begun your life as something that glimmered with the sun, and now you were encapsulated in your pupa. It was left to me to try and see through the shell, to see the grotesque transmogrification within. Not then. I did not see it then.

  It was your initiative. The matches half-inched from your own kitchen. Your mum’s matches. Your mum who said we could have been brothers. Your mum who dressed me in one of your old coats when I came to your door shivering one winter morning. Your mum who took me in when my grandma died. Your mum who fucked me over.

  Your plan. But by fourteen you were on the side of the hangman. Still, I made excuses for you. Best mates. Loyal as a kicked dog. It’s dogs that guard the gates, oblivious to what’s going on behind them. The last to know. Past the white pillars, the golden hinges, the snake draws its winding length.

  We watched as the fire spread, a momentary panic before we could see it diminish. We laughed again, this time out of relief. We walked up the embankment and across the recreational field. Past the Methodist chapel. I remembered that poster outside, something quite common now, but then it was a novelty to us: God is Love, it said. God is many things but he’s not love, I said. You joined in the game: God is non-existent. God is absent. God is angry. God is jealous. God is insane.

  As I walked along the railway track, not unlike the railway track we had walked then, I played the game again: God is a murderer. God is a sound wave, God is Charlton Heston. God is the sword of justice, God is a mote of dust, God is someone else. God is us. Playing the game on my own that we had once played together. And in this way, I vomited God out of existence, but I could not vomit you out of existence. You were bigger than God.

  I thought again about that fire, about the fire we’d started and of the game we’d played. How we’d delighted in each other, how we’d been enough for each other, had needed no one else, had needed nothing else. Complete. But beneath your carapace something slimy was shifting down to a sunless sea.

  I thought about that photograph in your front room, you and Liv on top of the Rockefeller. I dropped to the ground and curled up in a ball of hate.

  You are training with Keyop. You are doing reps. You are taking it in turns, using the bench-press. You are doing squats. You are doing press-ups. You are doing curls. You are doing chin-ups. He says nothing. He doesn’t even grunt. He is not himself. You sense this. He doesn’t let on and you do your workout. You ask him if he wants more weight, but he doesn’t hear. You ask him if he’s ok, but he doesn’t answer. You’ve seen him like this before. When he won’t talk, when he won’t answer.

  Eventually he says, ‘That story you told me.’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘The one about you camping when you were a kid.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘You said you’d never told anyone else.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You lied to me.’

  ‘Of course not. Why would I lie? Why are you even asking me?’

  ‘Look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t lie to me.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Keyop. Fuck off!’

  ‘I’m done’ he says.

  He walks off. You don’t say goodbye.

  You are in the library. You are reading Dante. It is hard going but you keep at it. You have read Purgatory and now you are reading Hell. You read a few lines, then you stare at the wall. Something is bothering you. You read some more, but it won’t go away. It is this: you have lied to Keyop. It is the one thing you both promised you would never do. But you have just done it. You didn’t think it was such a big deal, but now it is something playing on your mind. It is picking away at it. You read some more, for an hour at least, but the feeling just builds. You think back to a few weeks before. Keyop said that Paddy had told him something when they were playing poker. You want to know what. Paddy had said ‘I fucked your bird’. You told Keyop it wasn’t true. You and Paddy have not fucked. But now he knows you are a liar, he does not believe you.

  You are walking back to the cell, fear unsettles you. You want to run, but you stop yourself. Somehow you know. When you go into the room, the shock you feel is that you are not shocked by what you see. There is no sound. He is kneeling on the floor. His hands are by his sides. His head is tilted towards the ground. He is tethered to a radiator by a bed sheet. Like a goat tethered to a post. Somehow he has managed to strangle himself. You never said goodbye.

  17

  The train pulled up at the station. I got off and picked up a paper from the vendor, went to a café, ordered and sat down in the corner. Then I noticed the headline: GUILTY OF SAVAGE MURDER. It was the same headline I’d read twenty-two years ago, but instead of a photograph of me there was one of Kareem and one of Osman. The sub-heading: pair face life behind bars for the brutal killing of student and rugby star Tony Ho.

  There was the full story inside. Two full pages. Each had been sentenced to life imprisonment. Kareem would serve at least thirty years before he could apply for parole and Osman twenty-five years. There was no mention of you or the sterling job you’d done in bringing about justice. Andrew Honour QC: the invisible arm of the law.

  I thought about both men. One guilty of murder, certainly. The other in all likelihood not guilty. Not innocent. But not a murderer. I thought about my own day of judgement. No thing that had happened in my life up to that point had prepared me for that day, for that reckoning. No one I had met had prepared me for it either. No one had prepared me for the moment when the clerk of the court approached the foreman of the jury and said, ‘have you reached a verdict upon which you all agree?’ No one had prepared me for the moment when the foreman said, ‘yes’. Or for when the clerk said, ‘Do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty?’ And no one on earth could have ever prepared me for the moment when the foreman answered, ‘Guilty.’

  For those who are guilty, prison is tough. For those
who are innocent, prison is worse. I was innocent when I began my sentence. I was guilty by the end. To be guilty of my crime, to be punished for what I had done rather than what I had not done – that was a huge relief. Reaben Kareem and Jwanru Osman: it was Osman I knew would find life inside the harder of the two, because Osman was not a murderer.

  My full English arrived and a pot of tea. I read the rest of the paper but it didn’t register. I turned back to their photographs. They looked like murderers. Just as my photograph did when it made the papers twenty-two years ago. They always do, we always do, because the person who looks on the image has decided that you are a murderer.

  It was raining when I paid my bill and opened the door. I made my way over to the police station, past the statue of Harold Wilson: the man who abolished capital punishment. I stopped by the statue and said, ‘Thank you’. I owed him my life. I arrived at the police station but didn’t go in. What I had to say was better said on neutral ground. I decided to wait for Officer Leadbeater to leave the station – as I’d waited for you to leave your chambers. I took out my phone.

  Hi, Andrew, it’s me – Nick. Hey, listen, I’ve just seen the headlines.

  Eh?

  The guilty verdicts. Kareem and Osman. Congratulations.

  Thanks, Nick.

  It’s a real achievement, Andrew. I was thinking, we should celebrate. Have a night out. What do you think?

  I’m in Sheffield at the moment.

  When are you in Leeds?

  Not for a while.

  Don’t you get any time off over summer?

  I’m not sure.

  Come on, Andrew, for old time’s sake.

  I’m just so busy at the moment.

  One night won’t harm. You owe it to yourself. You need to unwind. Loosen a few screws.